It's time for a change

(Most self improvement sucks)

Or you can read any of the thousands of articles from massive health websites that teach you how to eat healthy, how to lose weight, how to be more productive, how to be happy.

Although these websites have the best intentions, they’re unknowingly doing something kind of freaking evil.

In almost everything they produce, no matter how hard they try not to, they highlighting all of the ways in which you’re currently not enough.

Do these 5 things to lose that stubborn belly fat, or these 10 things to have the relationship of your dreams, of these 3 simple tricks to be more productive than Elon Musk.

They tell you all of the things that you can do to be someone different, without helping you understand who you are today.

They address the surface without acknowledging the root causes of why you have weight to lose in the first place (or why you want to lose weight if you don’t need to). They tell you how to be productive without giving you context to understand why you’re procrastinating in the first place.

Why is that?

Because addressing the root cause is really freaking hard.

You might be overweight because there are unresolved emotional issues you drown out through food. Or you might think you need to lose weight because your self-esteem is totally whacked from years of abuse from the media and a system that tells kids good job for simply participating.

Or you procrastinate not because you don’t know how to be productive, but because you honestly just hate your job. No amount of Getting Things Done will make you want to work more.

It’s not that you can’t be better. You can be (all of us can be).

It’s that most websites are incentivized not to help you deal with those root causes. They need to keep you coming back day after day, reading article after article about fitness tips and recipes and productivity and happiness...

… So that they can make money from ad impressions.

They stuff you full of sweet listicles giving you tips and tricks to lose weight or be more productive. These will never help you fully achieve your goal, so you’ll always be back. And they’ll keep making $$$.

Tapping into your motivation

A crucial question is often overlooked and under-appreciated

Being down with self-improvement is great. It’s one of the most important things we can do as humans.

Personal growth is vital to fulfillment and life satisfaction.

But it’s not OK to blindly pursue improving yourself if you have don’t really know what’s driving you to be better and deciding what will actually make your life better (by better, we mean meaningful and fulfilling). It’s crucial to have a why and a how.

If you want to lose more weight, why is that? Do you need to lose weight because your current weight is putting your health at risk or because you want to attempt a new physical activity that you can’t currently do? Or are you losing weight because when you look in the mirror, you get fucking sad and start hating yourself and you think being fit will make you happy. Both are valid, but in both cases when you achieve your goal of “fitness” how fulfilled you feel could be very different.

Having a baseline understanding of why you want what you want is so important to actually getting anything positive out of your efforts of self improvement.

How do you figure out your "why?"

You don’t need to go to therapy to figure it out (although it helps). Simply asking some surface questions will push you in the right direction.

Understanding your motivating factors will help you figure out if the goals you’re pursuing are being pursued for reasons you actually believe in, or if they’re for shitty reasons that don’t actually align with who you want to be

Sometimes you may find yourself stuck in such a rut that making any change, regardless of the reason, is good. It helps you get going. It motivates you.

Mark Manson calls this the do something principle, and it’s that simple action motivates you to make more change. But long term change almost always requires evaluation of your true motivations.

Being your Best Me

What does being your best self mean?

Now let’s deal with the idea of your best self, or what we call your best me.

If you think about the idea of your Best Me, what do you feel?

It’s a nice idea right? Being the best version of yourself.

But what is the best version of you? How similar is that person to whom you are today?

If you’re like any normal human being living in today’s modern media culture, the person you want to be is vastly different than who you think you are now.

And that is an evil, insidious problem in today's world. It’s not natural.

The idea of your ideal self being better than who you are today is not inherent to the human condition, just inherent to the modern (aka Western) human condition.

We are bombarded by messages that tell us we can be better.

Buy this gum, and you’ll get a hot date!

Use this face wash, and you’ll be popular!

Drink this brand of beer, and, woooooo weee, is your life going to be awesome!

It’s not that you can’t be better, it’s just that no one product is going to change your life completely. You know this, and yet it rarely sinks in. What you need is a change in the way you think about and approach self improvement.

The crazy truth is that you are much closer to your “best me” than you probably give yourself credit for.

But since this idea has been so hidden from you, you chase phantoms instead.

You look for happiness in the numbers on a scale, or in your relationships, or in the size of your paycheck.

Being your best me is not about being some magical person who has all of these incredible qualities that you don’t have today. It’s not about doing everything the internet tells you to do to be better.

If I asked you to rattle off the top of your head what the best version of yourself did every week, you’d might say something along the lines of :

Eat super healthy, lots of veggies, limit red meat, workout 4 times a week, meditate, be focused at work, spend time with all of the important people in my life, etc.

But if I asked what the happy, fulfilled version of yourself would do every week, it would probably be something along the lines of:

Eat pretty healthy most of the time, but eat burgers and burritos when I wanted to. Work out consistently, but accept that sometimes other shit comes up or I’m just too tired. Meditate in the mornings, be focused but also not crazy because work is not my life. And yeah, I’ll spend time with family and friends, but I’ve only got so much time and I can’t please everyone.

And that’s the thing about your best me, it’s not all that different to who you are today. Your best me isn’t a different version of yourself. It’s just a person who is a little more focused on doing the right things on a daily basis, and a little more forgiving when you don’t do those things.

When is the best time to plant a tree?

So how do you get there? How do you figure this out?

Honestly, it’s not easy and it takes time.

Part of it is acknowledging that there’s almost never one thing that will turn your life around completely.

It’s a process of learning that who you want to be and who you are today are much closer to each other than you realize.

It’s about understanding the true motivations for why you want to change, not just the surface reasons you tell yourself.

It’s about getting comfortable with the idea that maybe your best self isn’t an end goal, but a reality that you can live each and every day.

It’s about realizing that you can’t do everything and you can’t be everything, so that self-improvement is in many ways more about choosing what not to improve and being very selective about what you do improve.

Part of it is acknowledging that life is a struggle and there will always be suffering, and we’re probably not ever going to live in a state of pure bliss. And that that is ok.

These things don’t happen in a day. They take time.

But as the saying goes: The best time to plant a tree was twenty years ago. The second best time is now.

We aren’t saying that your mindset needs to be perfect before you start taking action to improve. Acknowledging the importance of mindset is a big step. But the mental game can be improved with the physical.

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How will BestMe help you with your goals?

We're dedicated to serving you, and we're transparent

The company BestMe makes money by selling products that can make your life better.

This may seem contradictory to what we are saying above, but hopefully you’ll understand why it’s not.

People who are in blind pursuit of self-improvement will be overwhelmed by this site because there are so many ways to “improve."

But when you get clear about what you really want, you’ll be able to browse this site and find the exact tools that will help you on your mission.

We see these tools as training wheels to help you get your journey started.

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This company is made up of people who care deeply about you. That seems like corporate BS, but it’s true.

You’re not just random data point on an analytics dashboard. You’re not a dollar sign. You’re here because you want to make yourself better, and we take that responsibility seriously (even if we make poop jokes sometimes).

We’ve lived through eating disorders, depression, anxiety, mania and more. We’ve lived through deaths of family members, layoffs, and illness.

The reality is we’re still living through some of those things.

And what we’ve learned, from our own experience and the experience of thousands of others, is that when we are doing things for the wrong reasons, things generally don’t turn out well.

We work really hard and get a massive promotion, or we buy a fitbit and lose twenty pounds. Yet we feel just as empty as before (and we of course always put those twenty pounds back on).

Since we never got our minds straight from the start, we were doomed for failure.

To use this site properly, you need to work on both your mental and physical game.

You need to understand which products will actually work for you, and which products are going to be a quicksand trap for your money (we can help you make these decisions if you’re willing to trust us).

You need to understand what is worth improving right now, what can wait, and what simply isn’t worth it.

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BestMe.com is a website that makes its money recommending products. We have a store filled with books, wearables, programs, and services that can make your life better.

That doesn’t mean you need all of them.

It means that when you decide that you want to accomplish something, we’ve got some tools that we’ve researched the shit out of that we think can make your journey easier.

We hope that makes sense to you, but we’re happy to tell you more.

If you want to ask some questions, get in touch, or get some recommendations about some tools to help you on your journey, feel free to fill out the form below.